Entropy

Working on the Devil Queen has made it abundantly clear that entropy is inevitable and unstoppable. No matter how well built and maintained something is, in the end it too shall pass.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the largest paper in the state, runs old photos and post cards in their feature section four or five times a week. I don't have a subscription, but one of my co-workers brought this photo of Atkins to my attention.



Curious and armed with a new digital camera, I went and took a picture from roughly the same spot as the original photo.

The gray building (in the photo above) to the right of the flags is where the church on the far right of the 1908 photo stood.

None of the buildings from 1908 have survived; As far as I can tell, the railroad tracks are the only thing left from that time. All the homes and churches have burned down (my wife says the newspapers from that time are full of stories about house fires) or been demolished. Here is a picture of what they were replaced with in the 1920's.

There were similar buildings on the south side of the railroad tracks until the late 1960's and early 1970's. Some of them were in very poor condition, and the city condemned them. The buildings were all attached with shared walls. Once a couple of the buildings were demolished, whole blocks of buildings began falling down like dominos in slow motion. By the 1980's, they were all gone. This is what replaced them.

Beautiful, isn't it?